The appeal of an iconoclast

Beginning Friday, the Pacific Symphony will devote its sixth American Composers Festival to the beloved iconoclast Lou Harrison, who died at 85 in 2003. Filmmaker, arts presenter and dancer Eva Soltes, a longtime friend of Harrison, is now completing a documentary about him. Here she shares some of her memories.

*

LOU HARRISON wore cheap rubber shoes, spent a lot of money buying beautifully bound books and had a deep belly laugh like Santa’s -- which I sorely miss.

I never tired of visiting Lou’s house in the Northern California coastal town of Aptos. I was awed by his music studio, which he dubbed the Ives Room and packed with a collection of exotic instruments gathered from around the world or handmade by himself and friends, all laid out on large carpets and ornately painted stands. His arsenal also included harps, harpsichords, flutes, a piano, drums, gongs and an Indonesian gamelan.

This was Lou’s playground, where bold patterns and bright colors were welcome. It always felt like home.

Named for American composer Charles Ives, whose generosity paid for this artists’ haven, the Ives Room became the epicenter of five decades of musical experimentation and independent thinking. It was aptly facing the Pacific that, from 1954 until his death, Lou -- with a deep understanding of classical music from around the world -- created a visionary body of work that promotes beauty and international understanding.

Lou was a magnet for other artists. His jovial personality and generous nature easily gathered like-minded people around him. He learned the value of making this kind of life from his earliest musical mentor, the composer Henry Cowell, who in San Francisco in the mid-1930s advised him to listen to music from around the world, look to found objects for new sounds and refuse to depend on the musical establishment for opportunities to perform. It was important to create one’s own group of friends with whom to interact creatively.

Lou often spoke about Cowell and how he brought John Cage and Lou together in the late ‘30s. Cowell sent them foraging through junkyards, looking for discarded items such as automobile brake drums, which made the most beautiful bells imaginable. They also went through little shops in San Francisco’s Chinatown searching for new musical sounds in order to assemble a battery of bowls, bones and other objects to compose with, often to accompany dancers.

Lou was also a very kinetic person, and for him music was “a song and a dance.” Although his compositions are in a wide range of styles, his trademark sound is long, fluid melody and fetching rhythm. But this was a sin in the American music scene when Lou was coming up. New music was to be strictly atonal. Lou did some course work with Schoenberg in 1943. He spoke very highly of the man but eventually kept being drawn to try to “tonalize” atonal music. Eventually, he just tonalized his own music and became a kind of musical outlaw.

I was ever impressed that despite Lou’s mastery and many accomplishments, he always welcomed beginners into his world -- especially during his weekly gamelan sessions, when even at age 85 he would force his round body to sit cross-legged on the floor for the pleasure of playing with this magically interlocking, tuned percussion ensemble.

And, of course, Lou was fluent in the master composers from Europe -- which he referred to as northwest Asia. There were times he’d tell me with a twinkle in his eye, “You hear that passage of mine? It’s pure Brahms.” He advised young composers, if they were stuck, to start a new work with something they already knew. Lou often borrowed from himself. Many of his more than 300 works contain pieces of his other works.

He was also a voracious reader. His library contained thousands of books and recordings of music from all over the world. The openness that collection reflected infused his work with a wide and accepting point of view.

Lou’s music is deceptively simple. He was a melodist, which I think is why his works are not better known. They were shunned for decades by critics. I remember one sold-out concert at New York’s 92nd Street Y that I produced in 1997 to celebrate his 80th birthday. We were presenting “La Koro Sutro,” a work he composed setting a choral part of the Buddhist text the Heart Sutra in the international language of Esperanto. The “American Gamelan” that he and Bill Colvig, his partner of 30-plus years, constructed in the 1970s was the instrumental accompaniment. At the end of the concert, Lou received loud cheers and a standing ovation. The next day, the New York Times review referred to “Lou Harrison’s cult of Pleasantness.” He was uncharacteristically crushed. He said, “That’s New York: They pick you up and they put you down.”

But then, Lou always had a difficult time on the East Coast, where he spent the decade 1943 to ’53. He was part of the burgeoning American modern art scene. Robert Rauschenberg once remarked, “We had our poverty and our ideas.” Lou was barely scraping by when Virgil Thomson hired him to write music criticism for the New York Herald Tribune. Then in 1947, Ives shared his Pulitzer Prize cash award with Lou, and it probably couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

The year before, just after Lou conducted the premiere of Ives’ winning Third Symphony, his life in New York had come to a grinding halt. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was in a mental hospital for nine months. Cage, who had become a close friend, wanted to bring him home on the weekends but couldn’t afford a place for him to stay.

Remy Charlip, a fellow artist who became Lou’s partner soon after, recalled: “Lou could have done anything. He was handsome and talented. He painted, composed, conducted, became a master calligrapher. His scores were works of art in themselves. The only thing standing in his way was whatever was going on inside himself.” I don’t think living on the edge of poverty suited Lou.

From conversations with him, I know there were many factors that led to that breakdown. Among them were nightmares he suffered from the time of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With his humanitarian views, Lou understood the dire implications the bomb had for the future of humanity. There were also the pressures of living as an openly gay man in a disapproving world.

In 1953, Lou returned permanently to Northern California and soon to Aptos. It was the McCarthy era, and Lou once described to me the great tension in the air. He decided to build himself “a musical bomb shelter.” In his little cottage in the woods, he led a solitary life. Inspired by the writings of Harry Partch, he began experimenting with new systems of tuning instruments. He also composed a “Political Primer,” whose text described how governments should be organized, and a “Music Primer,” to share his composing methods with others, because nobody would hire him to teach.

In 1961, his life shifted when he received a Rockefeller grant to go to Asia. This was when his eyes were opened to Korean court music. On his return, he started constructing his own stringed instruments after an Asian model. In 1967, craftsman and musician William Colvig arrived on the scene; he was a perfect companion for Lou because he took over the constructing of instruments that Lou was eager to compose for. Lou often said, “If I hear a kind of music that I like, then I want to do it. Me too!”

*

FOR Lou, composing didn’t come easy. It was a labored process, and he once told me, “When the muse arrives, I become manic. I can’t sleep, and my pencil can hardly keep up with the paper.” Sometimes he spent years revisiting and revising a piece of music. His Third Symphony went through countless revisions. He made changes each time he heard it performed. Finally, easily 10 years after its premiere, he proclaimed it done. And then he changed it one more time!

The only music that was a total pleasure for Lou to compose was for gamelan, in particular the kind from the region of Java, where the slow-paced music creates wafting melodies punctuated by a deep gong. Lou loved this tradition of music that respected instrument-making. In an Indonesian gamelan, all the instruments are made by one maker and tuned by one maker. The instruments remain with a village while the players come and go. This is unlike a Western orchestra, whose instruments come together for the unmusical reason that the players happen to own them. The tuning of instruments was a primary concern for Lou. He didn’t subscribe to the Western music scale of 12-tone equal temperament. He considered this tuning out of tune.

I was with Lou and Bill a number of times when the “American Gamelan” instruments were to be used for a performance. It was such a complicated process getting them put together and voiced. Bill’s style of instrument-making was very precise musically but a little bit funky on the craft side. Yet Lou’s ear was so refined that he heard the tiniest little buzzes, which Bill then had to chase down and somehow stop. Bill would argue with Lou, “Nobody is going to hear that buzz,” and Lou would reply, “I’m an artist,” and Bill in a resigned voice would answer, “I know doing things the right way has gotten you where you are -- you don’t have to tell me that again.” But it was true: Once Lou was done tuning and voicing a set of instruments, it sounded like heaven.

Traveling with these two bearded gentlemen was always an experience to be treasured. From predawn hikes with Bill to afternoon and evening music with Lou, there was always something new. They never lost their sense of adventure and wonder at the world. Eventually, I began documenting their lives with still photographs and then video, because I kept thinking about how much people who came afterward would have liked to hear the spoken voices of Mozart, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.

During a trip the three of us made to Hokkaido, Japan, for the Pacific Music Festival in 1993, I brought Lou’s entire set of American Gamelan instruments as excess baggage! I had arranged a tour for them through Europe and met them in Japan, where “La Koro Sutro” was again to be performed. It was a riot as the three of us hunted around Japanese hardware stores trying to find the right kind of rubber bits, glues and so on to stop all the extraneous buzzes the instruments were making. We didn’t speak Japanese, but that didn’t stop us from also finding vibrant red and gold paints to spruce up the wooden stands.

We had been given a little log cabin in an art park in Hokkaido to renovate the American Gamelan and get it ready for the performance. The task took three weeks. Still, some of the bell trees remained missing, so Lou and I went from shop to little shop banging, ringing and pinging bells and bowls to find just the right sounds.

Artistic integrity was Lou’s lifeblood, the main thing he protected with his temperament. He hated “the business” of music because there were so many players out there -- publishers, presenters and musicians too -- who had their own points of view and wanted to change his work to suit their needs. Lou would have none of this. He guarded the purity of his art like a pit bull. Pity the producer or administrator who unwittingly crossed those boundaries. In many ways, I think this and Lou’s unapologetically gay manner were both factors that kept him from getting the wide recognition that he deserved and would have enjoyed in his lifetime.

After Lou died, I had the task of going through his personal things. I found his baby book, where his mother wrote: “Baby Lou Elmer sang with Daddy from three months old on, when Daddy would quit baby would start crying. Then Daddy would start again & baby would stop crying instantly & start singing.”

Lou was one of the few among us who actually fulfilled his destiny. Michael Tilson Thomas once remarked to me, “It’s almost awesome to consider someone who could have had such a long career in music and was always out of fashion. He never espoused any of the fashionable aesthetic isms of any of the periods in which he was writing. He just at that moment knew what he had to say or knew what he wanted to investigate in the art, and he just went ahead and did it.”

Happily for us, Lou Harrison left a stunning musical legacy.

More information about Soltes’ Harrison project is at www.harrisondocumentary.com.

*

‘Uncharted Beauty: The Music of Lou Harrison’

Where: Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Price: $15 and $25

Contact: (714) 755-5799 or www.pacificsymphony.org

Also

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, Founders Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 7:30 p.m. next Sunday

Price: $30

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall

When: 8 p.m. May 24 and 25

Price: $20 to $78